News Flashes

CA Technologies has announced what it calls its "Management Cloud" - a portfolio of applications, delivered from the cloud, that enable customers to make portfolio decisions, deliver service experiences and empower mobile workforces. "The Management Cloud portfolio was developed to manage complexity and transform IT investments into business value rapidly and effectively," said James Harvey, general manager of IT Business Management at CA Technologies.

HP has refreshed its portfolio of midrange and flash-optimized systems to offer new workload-centric storage personas, including unified storage access as well as data protection for flat backup to HP StoreOnce. This announcement builds on HP's vision for HP Converge Storage to simplify storage through polymorphic architectures with a single platform built for the new style of IT, said David Scott, senior vice president and general manager of storage for HP.

IBM and Docker, Inc., a provider of application container solutions, have formed a strategic partnership intended to help customers more efficiently build and run applications that can be moved between cloud and on-premises systems. "As enterprises demand tools that allow them to develop applications in a consistent and easy manner, Docker containers have quickly become the de facto building block for doing so," said Angel Diaz, vice president of open technology and cloud performance solutions at IBM.

IBM has announced that the availability of a beta for Watson Analytics, a cloud-based, natural language-based cognitive service that can provide access to predictive and visual analytic tools for businesses.

Luminex Software, Inc. has introduced a new line of mainframe virtual tape products, which it calls virtual tape vaults. Luminex's new MVT Vault is designed to store second or third copies of virtual tape data out-of-region for data protection.

SOA Software is shipping EnVision, an API analytics platform intended to help enterprises obtain information on the reach and performance of their application programming interfaces. The solution uses MongoDB as its data store.

Think About It

According to TeamQuest, on average, IT managers deal with eight unexpected IT issues per week, each requiring seven staff members to resolve. These include network slowdowns or outages, poor performing applications, availability issues, equipment failures, and unanticipated change requests. Less than one and four have the capability to predict these issues ahead of time. If seven or more staff members are constantly being distracted by performance issues, there is a good case to be made for automation and greater systems transparency.